Tuesday, August 7, 2018

Twofer: STALIN'S GHOST and THREE STATIONS – Martin Cruz Smith

Back in
the US, back in the US, back in the USSR...in
atmosphere, anyway—if not the poignance. There is no more Soviet
Union in either Stalin's
Ghost
or Three
Stations,
episodes six and seven in the eight-episode Arkady Renko series. In
Russia, the former ruling Communist Party has devolved to
vodka-swilling geriatric pretensions, succeeded by vodka-swilling
gangsters and capitalist tycoons. Putin heads a government as corrupt
and incompetent as ever, and, as ever, the average vodka-swilling
Olga and Ivan must stand in lines for hours to buy
anything--groceries, basic household goods, and, of course, the one
bright light in their lives, vodka.

Pretty damned depressing for
most Russians, one would think, and with the universal disregard for
its ubiquitous suicides, the so-called "New Russia" would
seem to fall a tad short of Xanadu. Now then, while the excuses for
his people's daily despair segue during the decades from old to new
euphemisms one hero has stood tall against the grim landscape, a
champion with such stubborn integrity and courage neither treachery,
nor fist, bludgeon, blade, bullet, bribe, or bureaucrat can keep him
from bringing his villain to justice. Should you be wondering, this
be not Superman, Spiderman, Batman, Ant Man, Any Other Man, Tom
Cruise, or Mighty or Mickey Mouse. Nosirree, Boris.

This be
Moscow’s Senior Investigator of Important Cases (i.e. murder most
heinous) Arkady Kyrilovich Renko! Did I include humility and a light
sense of irony among his attributes? There’s this:
Victor Orlov, a drunken wreck of a Moscow militia sergeant who helps
Renko investigate cases, suggests after Renko’s sleazy boss fires
him, “You can’t go on pretending that you’re an investigator.”

Renko responds, “I’ve been
doing it for years.”

And this:
Finding himself alone in a room full of mirrors reflecting each
other, he’s startled by an impression he’s sharing the space
“with multiple desperate men with
lank hair and eyes deep as drains,
the sort of figure who might wander the streets on a rainy night and
cause people to roll up their car windows and jump the traffic
light.”

While he
beds a different woman in each episode he’s no James Bondian skirt
chaser. He’s a classic Russian romantic who falls in love with
these women, and, typically, loses each of them before the next
appears. Eva, the radioactive Chernoble physician who seduces him in
Wolves
Eat Dogs
and follows him to Moscow, dumps him for a spell with one of the
villains in Stalin’s
Ghost
(it’s complicated), and then leaves him for good in Three
Stations.
She says in her farewell note, “I will not wait around until they
kill you. I won’t be the grieving widow of a man who insists on
teasing the executioners of the state. I will not be there when
someone shoots you in your car or answering the doorbell and I won’t
walk in your funeral cortege.” A classic Siberian romantic.

Anya,
Renko’s feisty next-door neighbor, a free-lance journalist, then
steps in and seduces our lucky/luckless hero, only this time it’s
more of a casual, affectionate thing than the stuff of poetry. It’s
still going on in Tatiana,
the last of the series, which I’ve just begun and will report on
next week. If I had to guess...I won’t. Let’s just say it
wouldn’t shock me dangerously to see the thing with Anya
strengthen, or deepen, or however Pushkin might have put it, if
Martin Cruz Smith doesn’t turn them both into angels and bring the
moth-gobbledRed
curtain down once and for all. After all, it’s been five years now.
The longest stretch between episodes should yet another one manage to
squeeze out of the word processor. The fear I expressed
earlier
that Renko would be battered into paraplegia should the series
continue much longer...um, he does have a law degree from Moscow
University, by the way, and just might...

On third
thought, a very minor character that sprouted silently in Wolves,
has, over the subsequent two episodes blossomed into what could
become Renko’s successor should Smith wish to branch the series off
in another direction. Renko befriended Zhenya, an eleven-year-old
runaway mute crashing occasionally in an orphanage. Renko takes the
boy out and about on the pretext of trying to find Zhenya’s
disappeared father, all the while trying to draw him out of his stony
silence. Nothing works, although Renko learns the boy has a natural
talent for playing chess. In Stalin’s
Ghost we
find
Zhenya hustling chess games on the street for money, and eventually
playing in citywide championship matches. He’s finally talking,
too. In fact he’s quite smart and articulate. In Three
Stations,
now fifteen, he helps a runaway girl his age who’s hiding from
prostitute “catchers” while trying to track down her
three-week-old baby stolen from her on the train to Moscow.

Three
Stations
is much tighter and faster paced than the others, half the length of
the earlier Renko novels. The main plot has Renko, technically fired
from his job by Zurin, the corrupt, incompetent city prosecutor he
works for, trying, with help from Victor and Willi, the besotted
pathologist/morgue attendant and former Renko classmate, to hunt down
a serial killer. Ever on the outs with Zurin, in Stalin’s
Ghost,
Renko and Victor (unauthorized, as usual) investigate a couple of
Renko’s police colleagues who apparently are running a
murder-for-hire
sideline.
One
of these investigator/killers is a political candidate for a state
senate seat with a newly formed Russian Patriot Party hoping to use
the image of the former bloodthirsty dictator to make
Russia great again.
The ghost part is a scam operated by the party’s film crew to fool
drunks at a Moscow subway station into thinking they’ve seen the
old boy’s ghost smiling benevolently at them from the station
platform.

The Moscow Putin doesn't want you to see

Stalin’s Ghost is the
roughest episode in the series for Renko—thus far. By this I mean
he’s come the closest to violent death. Twice. Without giving too
much away about the worst one, I’ll share this quote from our
intrepid, unauthorized, haunted, lovelorn, scarecrow Senior
Investigator of Special Cases, speaking of himself: “one
brain, slightly trimmed.”

As for making Russia great
again, Smith gives us this analogy via Renko, in Three Stations,
who hears a long-neglected piano from the Yaroslavl Station waiting room
that had been brought outside for a festival. He’d seen the
instrument often but never before heard it played: “Someone
was playing it now, despite the fact that the piano had not been
tuned in years. Unexpected sharps and flats abounded, and some keys
were totally dead.

4 comments:

Jeez, I cannot even pretend that I'll be reading these any time soon, Mathew. I'm so done with grim and depressing. As long as things are what they currently are in this country, I simply cannot deal with any more depressing stuff. Call me a wimp, but that's me.

I have read Stalin's Ghost, but don't remember much. (That is typical, not a criticism of the book.) I do remember I did not like it as well as the others. Which may be why I have not read Three Stations yet, which I have had for 8 years. I only skimmed your post because I don't want to know much going into Three Stations, which I hope to read before the end of the year.

Now that I've read Tatiana I realize I'd read all eight in the series when they first came out. But I'd forgotten the plots of them all, so it was almost like reading them anew, with only a vague sense of déjà vu. I think this time more will stick, but I don't expect to reread any of them anytime soon.